The Miami Story (1954)

The Miami Story (1954) is a Kefauver hearings inspired city-titled Florida noir tale of mobsters, massive hidden television cameras, an informant and murder suspect who come out of hiding to boss the police about, and roving cameras which film the streets of Miami as automobiles carry mooks, thugs and suspects from location to location.

The Miami Story (1954) is a delight of cheap and effective film noir from the most unconvincing period of the style, when black and white denoted cost-savings and often meant that the stock and trade shadows of noir were consigned to the cutting room floor, in order to create a brighter and whiter screen of action, better suited to the television.

Framed (1947)

Framed (1947) is a sap drifter frame-up femme-fatale murder film noir which features many a trope from the classic canon, and provides evil atmosphere aplenty for noir-seekers seeking the less than canonical but still functional examples of the classical canon.

Within this atmospheric noir landscape Glenn Ford assumes the role of the intrepid trucker miner and engineer heel and sap for the rap drifter Mike Lambert, a man thrust into an alcoholic ordeal when he unwittingly becomes embroiled in a web of deceit and danger. 

Behind the wheel of a truck sans brakes, his journey careens into the shadowy confines of La Paloma, a nondescript bar and restaurant where fatal sleaze and hot love intertwines his path with that of the enigmatic waitress, Paula Craig, portrayed with mesmerising female fatalistic allure by Janis Carter.

Suspense (1946)

Suspense (1946) is an ice-skating mystery film noir, combing the popular tropes of the self-propulsion and gliding of an dancer across an ice surface using metal-bladed ice skates — and the mystery and murder aspects of noir.

Barry Sullivan plays Joe Morgan, an unkempt drifter type who arrives in Los Angeles and winds up working at an ice theatre, the star of which is Roberta Elva, played by former Olympic skater Belita. The heavy crime and mystery melodrama which ensues is solid film noir, insofar as it is redolent of nothing less than a nightmare.

Tension (1949)

Tension (1949) is a superlative hen-cucked husband murder mystery double identity hard-boiled cop on the case film noir starring Audrey Totter, Richard Basehart, Barry Sullivan, Cyd Charisse and William Conrad.

Tension (1949) sits at the apex of 1940s fantasy film noir in which the darkest thoughts become rampant reality — it is one of the style's best examples of obsessive, uninhibited dark tales of suburban and urban America, involving a doomed marriage, feral morals and weakness. 

The term fantasy refers here to a certain lack of inhibition in the story telling.